I woke with the sunrise, though I felt nothing close to radiant. My body was stiff, my leg still aching from the previous day’s drive, and the air in the Beetle carried the metallic bite of cold and petrol fumes. The windscreen was glazed with frost, and the light that broke through it seemed almost liquid — the sort that takes its time settling over the land.

I started the engine, coaxing it like an old horse, and pulled out onto the road again. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a grinding sound from the front of the car — new, sharp, and worrying. The good news, I told myself, was that it wasn’t coming from the back, where the engine was. I turned around and limped back to the petrol station I’d left only half an hour before.

By then, the forecourt was alive again. A sleepy attendant in overalls leaned against a pump, yawning into his fist. When I described the noise, he shook his head slowly and said there was a mechanic a few kilometres down the road — in die groot sinkskuur, the big corrugated barn. “Jy kannit nie missie, meneer,” he assured me — you can’t miss it.

I wasn’t so sure. The Karoo has a way of turning directions into riddles for the lack of roadsigns, and I doubted the mechanic had ever seen a credit card, much less owned a machine for one. Still, I set off, hoping the Beetle would make it.

It did. Barely. The mechanic turned out to be a kind man with rough hands, his Afrikaans thick and musical. Between his broken English and my fractured Afrikaans, I pieced together the problem — the front wheel was about to part company with the car entirely. He tightened the bolts, gave me a stern lecture about bald tyres, and sent me on my way. A few rand lighter, but considerably safer.

The road soon opened into a broad valley, and before long I was crossing the Orange River near the Gariep Dam. I can’t recall the name of the town there — it was small, unassuming — but I remember its beauty as though it were carved into me. The river shimmered under a thin veil of drizzle, the kind that blurs everything it touches. The sun broke through the clouds in great golden shafts, sweeping the hills and fields as though the land itself were being revealed for the first time. A faint rainbow arched above it all, delicate and perfect, like a closing bracket on creation.

A few kilometres further, I came across a diner beside a general store. Outside, a handful of farmhands loitered, their faces worn and open, laughter spilling between them. Many were descendants of the Khoi — the original gatherer-hunters of these plains — and others were Griquas, the mixed-race people who had moved north generations ago to escape the prejudice that even the most “liberal” Cape Province couldn’t quite shed.

They greeted me easily, their eyes bright with the unhurried rhythm of men who know the land. Their stories, told in fragments and laughter, carried the dust of generations. If a person had the time, they could sit there all day, listening to the old tales, each one rich with hardship and humour. Yet beneath the camaraderie, there was a sadness — the kind that seeps into a place over time. Many of their communities were fading, pushed to the margins by progress they’d never asked for. In small settlements scattered across the Cape, alcohol had hollowed out lives. You could see it in the shortness of stature, the slackness of limbs — damage carried quietly through the generations.

Inside the diner, I found a seat by the window and ordered breakfast — though “fast food” was clearly a misnomer. The room was a shrine to laminate: tables, menus, even the marble effect on the walls. Chrome trim gleamed under the fluorescent lights, and the vinyl seats clung to the backs of my legs like the Beetle’s upholstery. The condiments were clogged with dried sauce, and the serviette dispenser looked one squeeze away from explosion.

Outside, a plastic bag danced in the breeze, swirling and swooping in aimless circles. A stray dog limped past, its ribs showing, its eyes dulled to the dust. Then came a man — clearly drunk, even at that hour — rummaging in his coat for a familiar orange packet of Boxer tobacco. He pulled out a wad, shaped it deftly into a cigarette using a torn corner of newspaper, and slipped it between his lips in a single, elegant motion. “Well-rehearsed,” I thought.

With a quart of Lion beer — No. 17, as the locals called it — in one hand and his half-rolled cigarette in the other, he tottered toward a line of men basking in the sun against the wall. As he sat, his cap fell to the ground and was immediately forgotten. Watching him, I remembered a story I’d once read by a South African advertising man. A popular wine label had once featured bunches of grapes on its neck — five, to be exact. Locals, many of whom couldn’t read, came to know the wine by that number: Five Grapes. Then the company modernised its design, reducing the bunches. Sales plummeted. When the old design returned, so did the customers.

Thus was born what they called third-world advertising — visual branding for the illiterate. Soon, companies were sending out road shows: actors on the back of flatbed lorries performing their adverts live, drawing laughter and applause from the crowd.

I smiled at the memory as my breakfast finally arrived, the eggs trembling on the plate. Outside, the drunk man lifted his beer in salute to no one in particular. The others nodded, and the morning went on — slow, sunlit, and unbothered by time.